A Hundred Thousand Worlds: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of July 2016: It’s easy to compare Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Both center on comic books, and both take those creations seriously (as well they should). But where Chabon’s tale is wide in scope, Proehl’s is tightly framed on a handful of weeks in which four people—a comic book artist, a comic book writer, a former TV star, and her nine-year-old son—travel cross-country to various comic-cons. Proehl’s touch is both sensitive and assured: Even the smallest interactions between Alex and his mother, Val, echo with a bright poignancy. Young Alex is the beating heart of the novel, and A Hundred Thousand Worlds can easily be read as a coming-of-age tale, but its steely strength lies in its recognition that we’re all constantly growing up, no matter how old you are. And growing up is always a wee bit painful. Says a Joss Whedon-esque TV director, staring out at the convention hall of the Los Angeles comic-con: “You know what all this is, don’t you? This is the immune system of the human soul. Superheroes, space rangers, time cowboys, they are the T cells of the spirit. There were always here to save us. We made them to save us.” After reading A Hundred Thousand Worlds, you will add Proehl’s smart, flawed, and thoughtful characters to the list of those who can save us and our dreams. --Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review